1. Technical Field
The present invention relates in general to data processing, and in particular, to management of present timing in a distributed presentation environment.
2. Description of the Related Art
In many business, academic and social settings, presentations include both a spoken component in which a human presenter orally presents information and an multimedia component in which the spoken component is reinforced and supplemented through the presentation of textual, graphical, numerical, image or video information, typically presented utilizing some information technology (IT) infrastructure. To expand access to presentations and to reduce travel time and cost, many presentations are made utilizing distributed presentation technology in which at least some (and perhaps all) of the presentation participants are located in one or more a different physical locations than the human presenter.
In distributed presentation systems, the human presenter, who is stationed at a presenter's presentation device, typically controls the timing at which elements of the presentation (e.g., slides or charts) are presented by supplying inputs (e.g., mouse clicks or keystrokes) at the presenter's presentation device. The participants, which may have one or more participant presentation devices in network communication with the presenter's presentation device, may view the elements of the presentation after varying delays, which may be due, for example, to network bandwidth limitations and/or differing processing powers of the participants' presentation devices.
Because of the varying delays in the presentation of elements at the participants' various presentation devices, the presenter does not know when to begin speaking to the presentation participants about a next element of the presentation.